Before a "mea culpa" becomes necessary, I'll observe what all of Dufresne's fortunate readers already know: No matter how sad, ridiculous, terrifying, poignant, goofy, or heroic a particular passage, Dufresne seems to be having the time of his life fitting sentences together.

Here, Coyote noses around for the truth behind what the police have concluded is a murder-suicide committed by Chafin Halliday, an upscale Eden Lakes restauranteur. The search takes him as far as Alaska for the novel's climax and as near as his side yard, where a homeless raconteur named Red has taken up residence.

Coyote is a sometimes not-so-wily therapist, freelance "forensics consultant" and actor in community theater whose father, Myles, suffers from Alzheimer's, whose best friend, Bay Lettique, is a poker professional and "sleight-of-hand man," and whose cat, Django, deserves a speaking role in the inevitable film adaptation. Like any self-respecting protagonist, he spends the novel hunting the tragicomic White Whale swimming inside him as anvils drop from the South Florida sky.

In other words, don't expect a linear, airtight plot. Author of "Louisiana Power & Light," "Deep in the Shade of Paradise," and "Requiem, Mass.," along with several collections of stories, Dufresne has always delighted -- sometimes to a fault -- in digression, arcane speculation, and lush description of food, flora, and fauna.

Like James Sallis, whose darker-toned New Orleans novels "No Regrets, Coyote" often resembles, Dufresne can't resist having his characters linger over meals, make microscopic behavioral observations that have little or no bearing on the tale being told, and conduct introspective inquiries seemingly for their own sake.

As Coyote asks his own therapist, Thalassa Xenakis, " 'If one particle can instantaneously affect another, even from the other side of the galaxy ... then anything, time travel, anything at all, is possible. And then what happens to our stories? To narrative coherence? How do we help our clients shape their life stories?'"

The best sort of therapist, she knows plot is far from everything: "Thalassa said we'd still have ... cause and effect, but maybe the effect precedes the cause. You'd be able to read a story backward or from the middle back to the start and ahead to the end at the same time."

In the end, Dufresne, the best sort of novelist, allows his hero to solve the crime as much as anything can ever be solved: Coyote, Bay, and a character whose identity I won't divulge driving into the Everglades, a "story of ...triumph over the misery and squalor, the treachery and cruelty" beginning to unfold.